Filed under: Uncategorized]]>https://ophir.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/unique-marketing-in-eat24/feed/0ophirkPublic Cloud is Better than On-Premise and Netflix vs Zynga proves ithttps://ophir.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/public-cloud-is-better-than-on-premise-and-netflix-vs-zynga-proves-it/
https://ophir.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/public-cloud-is-better-than-on-premise-and-netflix-vs-zynga-proves-it/#commentsSat, 29 Nov 2014 23:59:22 +0000http://ophir.wordpress.com/?p=3219]]>There is a common myth that for super large scale companies it makes sense to build their own data center instead of using a public cloud.

In many cases I believe this is exactly the opposite. For many companies, time to market, focus and top line are more critical than a theoretical saving 20% on the cost.

The Killing , Wikipedia

Consider Netflix and Zynga. Both companies are large and smart enough to build their own private clouds.

Zynga chose to leave AWS and build their own cloud infrastructure. Netflix chose to stay on AWS, probably with a huge discount.

Their stock price might hint on which company made the right choice.

Netflix Vs Zynga

Netflix focused the company’s energy on moving from a tech company into a movie production studio with shows like “House of Cards” , “Arrested Development”,”The Killing” and “Orange is the new Black”. Zynga was busy in becoming a data center company. Instead of focusing on social games and preparing for the next big change into Mobile.

The more generic point is that the bottleneck in most companies is a person. More specifically, it is management attention. If everyone is busy in building a private cloud and purchasing 1000’s of servers, no one has time to create a new business line.

The thought is that a private cloud becomes attractive with huge scale because the number of devops people to write software has an upper bound.

This might be true, but there are very few people in the world who have already done it, and hiring takes a lot of time.

The other option is to hire inexperienced people, at least on this scale, and they would make mistakes.

Companies like Netflix and Zynga are supposed to have 70-90% gross margin. Reducing cost of hardware from 20% to 15% is nice, but even that is not straight forward. And in any case, it is much less important than losing or creating a new $1B on the revenue side.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Elastic Computing, Management, Product Managment, Uncategorized, Virtualization]]>https://ophir.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/public-cloud-is-better-than-on-premise-and-netflix-vs-zynga-proves-it/feed/2ophirkNetflix Vs ZyngaTen Famous Jews in Hi-Techhttps://ophir.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/ten-famous-jews-in-hi-tech/
https://ophir.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/ten-famous-jews-in-hi-tech/#respondFri, 30 Aug 2013 10:42:24 +0000http://ophir.wordpress.com/?p=3213]]>The list does not imply any conclusions in either direction. Some of the people below may not even think of themselves as “Jews”, but I still thought it was interesting and maybe inspiring as well.

I left out many famous Israeli Jews in Hi-Tech , as the list would be much longer. The names appear in no particular order. Strangely, the best sources were either Jewish journals or horrible anti-Semitic web sites.

During the last two years I had the pleasure of participating in a team that built a new engineering center for EMC in Beer Sheva.

Beer Sheva is only 116.5 kilometers from Tel Aviv, but had five Hi-Tech companies , compared with around 3,000 in the greater tel Aviv area.

The beginning was not easy. There are 500 graduates from Ben Gurion University who are potential software developers. However, because of the lack of employment, many relocate to Tel Aviv after graduation.

This was a Catch-22 problem. Without potential employees, there are no Hi-Tech companies and without Hi-Tech companies there would be no employees.

To break this cycle, EMC and the Israeli government have decided to create a plan to change the momentum . The idea is to create a great innovation center, that would allow smart, motivated employees to generate a great product in the south of Israel.

Temporary Office

There were quite a few challenges to deal with :

* Lack of the common infrastructure that exists in the center of Israel.For example, recruiting companies, IT professionals, catering services a training.

* Missile attacks . We had probably one of the very few software development centers in the world that had a missile attack targeted at their city every 4-6 months.

An interesting anecdote is that our employees actually felt they have the best physical security in all of the global offices.

* A relatively small pool of mid level and senior level managers.

First Aid Training

The reason for success lies first and for most in the great employees we recruited and the support of the University, the local Mayor and EMC headquarters.

The employees in Beer Sheva created a great sense of community and belonging from the very beginning.

Employees

Our strategy , unlike previous “outsourcing” concepts, was to treat the center equally to the main office in “Herzelia“.

We offered the same high profile projects and set the same high bar for recruiting, but also offered similar compensation.

The results were wonderful : an amazing acceptance rate for job offers, very fast recruiting and motivated top talent showing fast results.

With the assistance of local community leaders were able to promote a Hi-Tech environment around us as well:

Filed under: Uncategorized]]>https://ophir.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/israeli-genome-compiler-creating-genetically-engineered-glowing-plants/feed/032.095641 34.79031432.09564134.790314ophirkGlowing Plants What were they thinking?https://ophir.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/what-were-they-thinking/
https://ophir.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/what-were-they-thinking/#respondSun, 28 Apr 2013 11:04:46 +0000http://ophir.wordpress.com/?p=3161]]>Sometimes I feel like a character in a Dilbert cartoon. Why would a very senior, smart executive, who is Not a functional idiot make an obviously senseless choice?

Here are few examples

George W. Bush senior, a new product management director, wanted to move Daniel , who now reports to him, into a new position. For some reason, he chose to discuss it first with Emmy who reports to Daniel. Daniel learned about the new plans from Emmy and was insulted twice. Emmy was also distressed about the weird behavior of her Director.

Senior accountant Jack Silverman sent an email to 100,000 employees – “Some people are not filling their expense report forms correctly. They keep putting the expenses with decimal points, while the system can only expect integers. This is breaking our ERP and causing a lot of work for the finance department. Employees who continue to make this mistake would face disciplinary actions and may be fired, if they do not amend their ways.”

Senior VP Jack Welsh decided to shut down the new social media network “Buddy Buddy” as the engineering team in Texas failed to deliver a working product for over a year. The official reason was that “Buddy Buddy” overlaps the existing product line. Three months later, Jack announced a new product called “Chuku Chuku” which will connect people through social interactions. The new product leader would be Shlomo Shlomo who ran “Buddy Buddy” .

Food for thought

George R.Martin , the new CEO just a hired Donald Duck as his new VP of product management. Three months later he decided to fire Donald. He quickly hired Mickey Mouse , an experienced product marketing manager , but fired him as well after four months. Even Pluto did not last more than five months at the job. While this unfortunate turn of events can happen to the best, George never ran a background check and reference check on any of the candidates. George has been very strict regarding reference checks when his managers had new candidates, but he felt his intuition is good enough for the most senior positions In the company.

Morgan Dexter was a successful QA Executive for a large Pharmaceutical company for many years. For various reasons, the new management decided to find a new person to replace him. They wanted to do it respectfully, so allowed Dexter time to find a new position in the corporate. To everyone’s surprise. Dexter kept using his previous title, in public forums, even 12 months after the change has already happened.

“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
― Thomas Paine

One of the most dangerous leaders to have in a company is the unaccountable #2.

UNANT, for short , is usually a former founder, or a top executive, who is still involved in the company, but has no direct reports, or clear accountability for a specific business line.

It can be the CTO, chief strategy officer,the vice chairman or any other obscure title.

Because of his seniority,status and experience the UNANT advises are actually considered decisions.

Unlike other managers, his decisions don’t have to be backed by budgets or organizational support , as he is not the one executing them or responsible for the outcome. It also makes life hard for the rest of the team. Who wants to contradict a member of the board?

Name this #2

In many cases, the lack of accountability , while the authority exists, makes it hard to distinguish “decisions” from “opinion”.

The UNANT tends use annoying stories from 20 years ago to show he is right (=everyone else is wrong ).

“What’s so hard? We wrote version Three in two hours, we only had a broken typewriter , one chair for four people and we sold 50,000 copies in three days.”

The UNANT also comes up with original ideas like “If every developer puts an extra hour a day on cleaning the office we can fire our cleaners and save lots of money”

The only worst organizational type is the unaccountable #2 spin master .He actually has direct reports and theoretical responsibility , but manages to never pay the price for his decisions. His direct reports are usually being replaced

Here is a story. I’m sitting in a room with an extremely intelligent person. Our new VP of product marketing – Mr Y. He has an MBA from one of the finest universities in the world ,a track record as a C level executive in a Fortune 100 company. He is articulate and presents an amazing vision for the future of our company. Moreover, he defines concrete examples how we will be using social media and go beyond traditional enterprise marketing. I’m quite impressed. Finally, we have someone in marketing who knows what he is talking about.

One month later, Mr Y Speaks in an executive forum. He repeats exactly the same story with the same social media example and same jokes. I’m getting a bit suspicious , but as the great Jack Welch said – communicating your message is one of the top leadership roles. So, I give Mr Y the credit that he is talking to a new audience.

Two months later, Mer Y is already working with us for four months. We are in a customer conference. The same exact story, word by word . Two months later he was not working with us anymore …

He is probably a “Type A” functional idiot.

I recently learned the term “Functional Idiot” which I really like. Unfortunately it is not well-defined, yet. The Urban Dictionary definition for “Functional Idiot” is :

Type C functional idiot – A person who used to be very smart and effective, but became outdated and irrelevant (e.g Dan Margalit might be an example for the Israeli audience)

Let’s say you are walking around the office and you spot a “Functional Idiot” make a stupid decision. Let me provide you with tools to rationalize it.

Here is a second story. In a board meeting, you realize one of your board members (Let’s call him Prisoner X) suggests the company should release a “simple self-service” version of your costly, sophisticated enterprise product. This could have been a great suggestion. But we already did it six months ago and discussed it multiple times with him.

The challenge is that Prisoner X is quite smart and has a very good track record in the industry. How can we explain the fact he get’s $40K$ a month ,but is not able to remember the main products of his four companies?

Prisoner X is probably a type B functional idiot. He is very smart in the big picture and in identifying opportunities, but he is very bad in operational work and following details.

Type C functional idiots are easier to spot. You would usually find them in the CTO office, they have the word “Strategy” in their title. in a recent example I was observing a very long thread on the pros and cons of C vs C++. The heated discussions was taking place in 2012 by people with an amazing track record in the high-tech industry history. And it was a very interesting discussion to have. In 1996.

To conclude,It is essential to identify functional idiots and tell them apart. Otherwise we are all doomed

Going green. Why do American hotels provide 9 (as in 3*3, 4+5, 99/11) pillows for a single guest? And then they ask me not to replace the towels everyday.

Continental was bought by United. No major difference. Upgrading to business is now $600 instead of $500. All the rest is the same.

Snowy Boston

I’m not a virgin for Virgin anymore. First time flight from Boston to San Francisco. The only difference is that the crew is much more beautiful. Old fashioned stewardesses (meaning young and good looking ).

FaceTime is amazing. High quality video calls with family and 10 months old kid. Mac to iPhone, iPhone to iPhone and Mac to iPad.

The Windows store in Palo Alto mall is quite empty. It is three times bigger the the Apple store and has 25% people in it. The Sony store is somewhere in between.

Apple Store,Stanford Mall

Empty Windows Store,Stanford Mall

The new Windows 8 Laptops\Tablets from Sony and Microsoft are actually pretty nice, at a glance. The touch screen + Keyboard make a good combination and offers an interesting alternative to iPad. The price point is why they would probably fail.

iPad mini is even better than Ipad. Better form factor.

San Francisco, Fillmore and Broadway

Go Wireless! I physically broke three cables and adapters this trip. The American plugs are always loose and the Mac power adapter is quite heavy

In the “Cheese Cake Factory” choose the classic Cheesecake. Don’t be tempted for three layers of chocolate.

Could not see a big difference in 4K pixels TV. Probably need newer movies.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.Albert Einstein

As a manager, there are three domains which I try to avoid as much as I can.

Taxes, Intellectual Property and Real Estate.

They all seem to have an arbitrary logic, which is highly non intuitive, non useful, complex and out dated.

In many cases it seems they are controlled by people who make their living from making it more complex, rather than making it simple.

And the worst is when you get a combination of these domains in a business decision:

We can’t merge these companies because we will have to pay a tax for “IP”

We cannot move this activity to Israel because our IP is listed in New Zealand

We can’t sell this division ,which we don’t need, because we already wrote it off as a tax loss

If we buy more real-estate we “earn” more money for tax benefits

I understand that “Taxes and Death” are the only two certain things in life. I also understand that Intellectual property can provide big income for patent Trolls. I even realize that selling and buying real estate is a great way to become a rich daddy.